bmcgilvray

I agree and it is beginning to be a little tedious.

bmcgilvray

So if the ammunition is not recommended for use by Mas then it is against the law to use it against an assailant?



To read the content of many different forums and published articles these days, a person is led to believe that he can only legally defend himself by:

utilizing a firearm with a double-action-only trigger.
utilizing certain factory ammunition (exactly which certain factory ammunition is always in debate).


It is quite hilarious when one thinks about it.


Oh, by the way, the sky is falling!

ccw9mm

No. That would be twisting what has been stated all out of proportion.

Some places have prejudice about hollow-point bullets. Some, about caliber that is "too big" to get the job done. Some questions in past cases suggest that having actual factual data to support a given load's characteristics helps quell silly claims of overkill that might arise once the opportunity is opened by not having such documentation. People have been hung with less, over the years. I'm sure Ayoob and others have reams of data of actual case history in which such questions were asked.

Call it what you will. The suggestion is simply that it can be wise to stick with knowns, as opposed to venturing into unknowns, when it comes to tools of violence we employ to save our lives.

__________________
Your best weapon is your brain. Don't leave home without it.
Thoughts: Justifiable self defense.
Explain: How does disarming victims reduce the number of victims?
Deal with evil through strength. Affirm the good in Man through trust.
NRA. GOA. OFF.

Miggy

This is a post from Mas Ayoob in another forum.
---------------------------------------------------

Cases Where Handloads Caused Problems in Court
As promised, here are the sources for records for any who feel a need to confirm the cases I have referenced previously where handloaded ammunition caused problems for people in the aftermath of shootings.

As I have noted in this thread earlier, and as the attorneys who have responded to this matter have confirmed, local trials and results are not usually available on-line. However, in each case, I have included the location where the physical records of the trials are archived.

NH v. Kennedy

James Kennedy, a sergeant on the Hampton, NH police force, pursued a drunk driver whose reckless operation of the vehicle had forced other motorists off the road. The suspect ended up in a ditch, stalled and trying to get underway again. Advised by radio that responding backup officers were still a distance away, and fearing that the man would get back on the road and kill himself and others, Kennedy approached the vehicle. At the driver’s door, the suspect grabbed Kennedy’s Colt .45 auto and pulled it towards himself. It discharged in his face, causing massive injury.

The reload in the gun was a 200 grain Speer JHP, loaded to duplicate the 1000 fps from a 5” barrel then advertised by Speer for the same bullet in loaded cartridge configuration.

This was the first case where I saw the argument, “Why wasn’t regular ammunition deadly enough for you,” used by opposing counsel. They charged Kennedy with aggravated assault. They made a large issue out of his use of handloads, suggesting that they were indicative of a reckless man obsessed with causing maximum damage.

Defense counsel hired the expert I suggested, Jim Cirillo, who did a splendid job of demolishing that argument and other bogus arguments against Kennedy at trial, and Kennedy was acquitted.

This case dates back to the late 1970s. The local courts tell me that the case documentation will be on file at Rockingham County Superior Court, PO Box 1258, Kingston, NH 03843. File search time is billed at $25 per hour for cases such as this that date back prior to 1988.

NJ V. Bias

This is the classic case of gunshot residue (GSR) evidence being complicated by the use of handloaded ammunition, resulting in a case being misinterpreted in a tragic and unjust way. On the night of 2/26/89, Danny Bias entered the master bedroom of his home to find his wife Lise holding the family home defense revolver, a 6” S&W 686, to her head. He told police that knowing that she had a history of suicidal ideation, he attempted to grab the gun, which discharged, killing her. The gun was loaded with four handloaded lead SWC cartridges headstamped Federal .38 Special +P.

Autopsy showed no GSR. The medical examiner determined that Lise Bias had a reach of 30”, and the NJSP Crime Lab in Trenton determined that the gun in question would deposit GSR to a distance of 50” or more with either factory Federal 158 grain SWC +P .38 Special, or handloads taken from his home under warrant for testing after Danny told them about the reloads. However, the reloads that were taken and tested had Remington-Peters headstamps on the casings and were obviously not from the same batch.

Danny had loaded 50 rounds into the Federal cases of 2.3, 2.6, and 2.9 grains of Bullseye, with Winchester primers, under an unusually light 115 grain SWC that he had cast himself, seeking a very light load that his recoil sensitive wife could handle. The gun had been loaded at random from that box of 50 and there was no way of knowing which of the three recipes was in the chamber from which the fatal bullet was launched.

We duplicated that load, and determined that with all of them and particularly the 2.3 grain load, GSR distribution was so light that it could not be reliably gathered or recovered, from distances as short as 24”. Unfortunately, the remaining rounds in the gun could not be disassembled for testing as they were the property of the court, and there is no forensic artifact that can determine the exact powder charge that was fired from a given spent cartridge.

According to an attorney who represented him later, police originally believed the death to be a suicide. However, the forensic evidence testing indicated that was not possible, and it was listed as suspicious death. Based largely on the GSR evidence, as they perceived it, the Warren County prosecutor’s office presented the case to the grand jury, which indicted Danny Bias for Murder in the First Degree in the death of his wife.

Attorney John Lanza represented Danny very effectively at his first trial, which ended in a hung jury. Legal fees exceeded $100,000, bankrupting Danny; Attorney Lanza, who believed then and now in his client’s innocence, swallowed some $90,000 worth of legal work for which he was never paid.

For his second trial, Bias was assigned attorney Elisabeth Smith by the Public Defender’s office. Challenging the quality of evidence collection, she was able to weaken the prosecution’s allegation that the GSR factor equaled murder, but because the GSR issue was so muddled by the handloaded ammo factor, she could not present concrete evidence that the circumstances were consistent with suicide, and the second trial ended with a hung jury in 1992. At this point, the prosecution having twice failed to convince a jury beyond a reasonable doubt, the judge threw out the murder charge.

It was after this that I personally lost track of the case. However, I’ve learned this past week that the case of NJ v. Daniel Bias was tried a third time in the mid-1990s, resulting in his being acquitted of Aggravated Manslaughter but convicted of Reckless Manslaughter. The appellate division of the Public Defender’s office handled his post-conviction relief and won him a fourth trial. The fourth trial, more than a decade after the shooting, ended with Danny Bias again convicted of Reckless Manslaughter. By now, the state had changed its theory and was suggesting that Danny had pointed the gun at her head to frighten her, thinking one of the two empty chambers would come up under the firing pin, but instead discharging the gun. Danny Bias was sentenced to six years in the penitentiary, and served three before being paroled. He remains a convicted felon who cannot own a firearm.

It is interesting to hear the advice of the attorneys who actually tried this case. John Lanza wrote, “When a hand load is used in an incident which becomes the subject of a civil or criminal trial, the duplication of that hand load poses a significant problem for both the plaintiff or the prosecutor and the defendant. Once used, there is no way, with certainty, to determine the amount of powder or propellant used for that load. This becomes significant when forensic testing is used in an effort to duplicate the shot and the resulting evidence on the victim or target.”

He adds, “With the commercial load, one would be in a better position to argue the uniformity between the loads used for testing and the subject load. With a hand load, you have no such uniformity. Also, the prosecution may utilize either standard loads or a different hand load in its testing. The result would be distorted and could be prejudicial to the defendant. Whether or not the judge would allow such a scientific test to be used at trial, is another issue, which, if allowed, would be devastating for the defense. From a strictly forensic standpoint, I would not recommend the use of hand loads because of the inherent lack of uniformity and the risk of unreliable test results. Once the jury hears the proof of an otherwise unreliable test, it can be very difficult to ‘unring the bell.’”

Ms. Smith had this to say, after defending Danny Bias through his last three trials. I asked her, “Is it safe to say that factory ammunition, with consistently replicable gunshot residue characteristics, (would) have proven that the gun was within reach of Lise’s head in her own hand, and kept the case from escalating as it did?”

She replied, “You’re certainly right about that. Gunshot residue was absolutely the focus of the first trial. The prosecution kept going back to the statement, “It couldn’t have happened the way he said it did’.”

The records on the Bias trials should be available through:
The Superior Court of New Jersey
Warren County
313 Second Street
PO Box 900
Belvedere, NJ 07823

Those who wish to follow the appellate track of this case will find it in the Atlantic Reporter.

142 N.J. 572, 667 A.2d 190 (Table)

Supreme Court of New Jersey
State
v.
Daniel N. Bias
NOS. C-188 SEPT.TERM 1995, 40,813
Oct 03, 1995
Disposition: Cross-pet. Denied.
N.J. 1995.
State v. Bias
142 N>J> 572, 667 A.2d 190 (Table)


TN v. Barnes

The decedent attacked Robert Barnes and his young daughter with a large knife and was shot to death by the defendant with SJHP .38 Special reloads from a Smith & Wesson Model 36. The distance between the two at the time of the shooting became a key element in the trial, and a misunderstanding of that distance was a primary reason he was charged with Murder. The evidence was messed up in a number of ways in this case, and I do not believe the reloaded ammo (which the prosecution did not recognize to be such until during the trial) was the key problem, but it definitely was part of a problem in reconstructing the case. We were able to do that without GSR evidence, and Mr. Barnes won an acquittal. In this case, I believe the use of factory ammo, combined with proper handling and preserving of the evidence by the initial investigators, would have made the defense much easier and might well have prevented the case from ever being lodged against him.

The records of TN v. Barnes are archived under case number 87297015 at:

Criminal Justice Center
201 Poplar
Suite 401
Memphis, TN 38103

Iowa v. Cpl. Randy Willems

A man attempted to disarm and murder Corporal Randy Willems of the Davenport, IA Police Department, screaming “Give me your (expletive deleted) gun, I’ll blow your (expletive deleted) brains out.” Willems shot him during the third disarming attempt, dropping him instantly with one hit to the abdomen from a department issue factory round, Fiocchi 9mm 115 grain JHP +P+. The subject survived and stated that the officer had shot him for nothing from a substantial distance away. GSR testing showed conclusively that the subject’s torso was approximately 18” from the muzzle of the issue Beretta 92 when it discharged. Randy was acquitted of criminal charges in the shooting at trial in 1990. Two years later, Randy and his department won the civil suit filed against them by the man who was shot.

I use this case when discussing handloads because it is a classic example of how the replicability of factory ammunition, in the forensic evidence sense, can annihilate false allegations by the “bad guy” against the “good guy” who shot him. The records of State of Iowa v. Corporal Randy Willems are archived in the Iowa District Court in Scott County, Davenport, Iowa. Those from the civil suit, Karwoski v. Willems and the City of Davenport, should be at the Iowa Civil Court of Scott County, also located in Davenport, Iowa.

A final word: I did not research the above and place it here to placate lightweight net ninjas. I did it because three recent Internet threads led me to believe that a number of decent people had honest questions about the real-world concerns about using handloads for self-defense, and were possibly putting themselves in jeopardy by doing so. For well over a decade, certain people have been creating an urban myth that says, “No one has ever gotten in trouble in court because they used handloads.”

This is now absolutely, and I hope finally, refuted.

Respectfully submitted,
Massad Ayoob

__________________
You have to make the shot when fire is smoking, people are screaming, dogs are barking, kids are crying and sirens are coming.
Randy Cain.

GunFreeZone.net

bmcgilvray

These days it is really down to whether one wishes to protect himself from lawbreakers or from unethical and manipulative attorneys, prosecutors, and judges, along with the ignorant and thoughtless juries; all being a part of a system that jerks you around.

Considering several factors such as, the manipulations perpetrated in court cases and the always moving target of what is deemed an instrument of excessive force in the various jurisdictions, it might be "safer" for some timorous folk to forgo using a gun for self defense.

ccw9mm

The fearful go belly up, treating the above as an either-or problem.

The wise consider the options. In the case of handing something to the prosecution that they'd not otherwise have, it's more a case of wisdom than fear to not provide it.

__________________
Your best weapon is your brain. Don't leave home without it.
Thoughts: Justifiable self defense.
Explain: How does disarming victims reduce the number of victims?
Deal with evil through strength. Affirm the good in Man through trust.
NRA. GOA. OFF.

Shaughn

I think a Valid point has been raised about the use of Reloads and the potential problems with a Jury of our peers.

Most posting here has probably been around firearms and reloading for years, most of our friends are of a similar mindset, but they aren't going to be on our jury, it may be made up of 12 people, who's knowledge of what firearms are and can do is what they got off of CSI Miami.

So making a decision to use factory ammunition, versus our reloads, can be considered in the same light as the decision to CCW in the first place, planning for the potential worst while hoping for the best.

Given that I don't have a horde of high priced lawyers at my beck and call or a bottomless money pit to acquire them, limiting the factors that can come back and bite me is a sensible thing.

Which in the long run means more money to the ammo manufacturers and custom small scale loaders.

Colin

I can't find any 357Sig JHP, but can get XTP JHP bullets to reload. Which powders would be considered "low flash"? currently I am using Unique.

boscobeans

Check out Pete's 357Sig page.

Low flash powders:

AA#7 (Accurate Arms): Very low flash (3").

HS-6 (Hodgdon): Very low flash (3").

N350 (Vihtavouri): Very low flash (1").

Universal (Hodgdon): Very low flash (1").

bosco

Captain Crunch

Since you guys can't, or won't, keep it civil, I have deleted all of Tubby45's and MitchellCT's argumentative posts, as well as quotes thereof.

I strongly recommend that both of you review forum rule #2. It is very clear. Any future violations of rule #2 will result in infractions being issued. This applies to everybody.

If you have any questions, feel free to PM me.

And since there is no point in debating the topic of handloaded versus factory ammunition any longer, this thread is closed.

__________________


When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains,
And the women come out to cut up what remains,
Just roll to your rifle and blow out your brains,
And go to your God like a soldier.

Rudyard Kipling

Terry